News

| HAPPY RELEASE DAY - ROCKY VOTOLATO

posted at 04/16/2015

We're very happy to announce the official release of Rocky Votolatos new album. Hospital Handshakes wasproduced by Chris Walla (Death Cab For Cutie), it's Rockys eigth album and the first one for Glitterhouse, collaborating with a standout cast of Seattle musicians, including his brother Cody Votolato on electric guitar (The Blood Brothers), Eric Corson on bass (The Long Winters), Andy Lum on drums (Craft Spells/My Goodness), and with backup vocals contributed from L.A. based singer Emily Kokal (Warpaint).

Over the course of the last 15 years, Rocky Votolato has produced some of the most powerful music to come out of Seattle, an impressive canon anchored by earnest, lyrical songwriting, and delivered in a unique indie-folk-punk style that has evolved out of the Pacific Northwest music scene he was raised in. He has matured over the course of seven increasingly accomplished solo albums, and writes songs that seem to have been scratched into a boxcar wall by a worn-out and lonesome ghost.

"Hospital Handshakes" was produced by Chris Walla (Death Cab For Cutie), it's Rockys eighth solo album and the first one for Glitterhouse to release in Europe. But this isn’t just another album. The new full length will mark a turning point in Rocky’s career, the end result of a tumultuous transition that began with the songwriter second-guessing his gift and even considering retiring from music.

Those doubts began to creep in shortly after the release of his seventh album, Television of Saints, in 2012. The wellspring of songs that had flowed out of him since his days in post-punk group Waxwing and through six critically acclaimed solo albums had stopped. “It became painful for me to make music”, Votolato recalls. “I was hemmed in by the construct of who I thought I was supposed to be and I stopped believing in myself as a writer. On the surface I looked like a functioning artist, but behind the scenes I was completely blocked creatively, fighting a battle with severe depression, and struggling to keep my sanity.”

By the time he had finished the cycle for that album—culminating with a tour with MeWithoutYou—Rocky had not written a new song in more than a year. Frustrated, he decided to get off the road for a while and sought therapy for his deteriorating mental health. It was then, in the summer of 2014, that the creative floodgates finally opened and he recommitted himself to his music with a renewed passion and sense of purpose.

In the following 3 months alone, Rocky wrote more than 25 new songs. In October he took the new batch of songs into the Hall of Justice studio in Seattle, working in the same room where he created one of his most beloved albums, 2003’s Suicide Medicine. There he collaborated with that same album’s producer, Chris Walla, an old friend who is going through his own transition after recently retiring from his longtime role as guitarist and producer for Death Cab for Cutie. Speaking on his own involvement, Walla says, "This collection of songs hit me really hard, and at a really good time. It's shaping up to be a visceral and tactile album; the band is incredible, and Rocky's writing is spring tight right now. This is a good one."

“It’s been so great reconnecting with Chris,” Rocky says. “I really trust him and I feel like he is the perfect person to help me realize the vision for this album.”

Collaborating with a standout cast of Seattle musicians, including his brother Cody Votolato on electric guitar (The Blood Brothers), Eric Corson on bass (The Long Winters), Andy Lum on drums (Craft Spells/My Goodness), and with backup vocals contributed from L.A. based singer Emily Kokal (Warpaint), the album that will emerge promises to be unlike anything Rocky has released before. At the core of Rocky’s new music is the same earnest, impassioned, seeking voice, but now with a little more perspective, the product of self-realization hard-earned from a period of darkness and doubt. “I’m writing about trauma,” Votolato says. “A lot of the material I’m working with is dark and scary, but I know there is light and healing coming through in the process, and I hope that will show up in the music as well.”

“At the core of Rocky’s new music is the same earnest, impassioned, seeking voice, but now with a little more perspective, the product of self-realization hard-earned from a period of darkness and doubt.“

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